This is How to Make a 50mm f1.8 Perform Similarly to An 85mm f1.2 L Lens

Photographer Miguel Quiles recently set out to prove that you don’t need to best camera and lens setup in the world to deliver amazing photography results. Instead, he wanted to teach folks about how important lighting is. As part of a blog post for the Photoflex lighting school, he decided to pit a Canon 5D Mk III with an 85mm f1.2 L lens against a 7D with a 50mm f1.8. Then he used the same lighting setup with each camera kit, edited the results and compared them.

If you’re not looking at the images at 100% (and most clients that you’re shooting for won’t) you won’t really be able to tell the differences between the images, nor would you have any particular issues with them. In fact, with even more editing in Lightroom (which is really just the push and pull of a couple of sliders) you can make them look even more similar.

What Miguel was overall trying to show though is that you don’t need a really expensive camera setup to shoot better images; just effective lighting.